Why Do People Get Superstitious?

[Rilles]

i guess its some remnant from Stage Purple magical thinking... is there any explanation for this fairly random behaviour?

[Roy]

They are scared of the unknown.

They can't think of a reasonable explanation on their own. Or refuse to accept one presented to them.

They latch onto something quickly that fills that gap, regardless of the intellectual consequences. It feels good, that's all that matters.

[mandyjw]

Because you create your reality, you get what you focus on. If you see a black cat and expect bad luck you attract it into your experience and when something happens to you that you don't like you say "bad luck! I knew it!". When you don't understand how you create your reality, how powerful thoughts are or how the law of attraction works you blame the cat. 

The person who calls it superstitious is just as oblivious. Someone who believes in brains calls it confirmation bias. It's much stranger than that. 

[Nahm]

@Rilles An absence of understanding. 

“When you believe in things, that you don’t understand - you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.” 

-Stevie Wonder

[Forestluv]

3 hours ago, Rilles said:

i guess its some remnant from Stage Purple magical thinking... is there any explanation for this fairly random behaviour?

Sometimes it seems superstition is random, magical thinking. Yet sometimes might there be something to it.

Consider that hundreds of years ago, people that went to hospitals often died of infections they got in the hospitals. People back then didn't know about microbes like bacteria and viruses. They didn't even know what "infections" were. So, the hospitals were very unsanitary. . . Then along comes Ignaz Semmelweis, a doctor in Vienna, Austria. In 1847, he started washing his hands in chlorinated lime water. He believed this helped save lives. At the time, the mainstream view was that evil spirits where causing the mortality. Semmelweis's hand washing was the superstition of the time. He was the one that appeared to have magical, random behavior of hand washing. 

Interestingly, microorganisms were discovered 200 years earlier in 1665 by Robert Hooke and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. However, it wasn't until the 1860s in which Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease. So in 1847, Semmelweis's handwashing appeared to be superstition.

Sometimes I ponder. . . what are the "superstitions" of today that will be revealed to have underlying truth in the future? . . . And are there things discovered 200 years ago in the early 1800s that we haven't fully realized today?